For the last five hundred years, the Coward Queen’s ancestors had ruled the Cauldron and the Wash and the skies above. Some of them, like her grandfather, were even beloved by the people.
Ryke’s ancestors built the Hanging Palace, a shining castle with sweeping balconies, perched along the mountain ridge that surrounded the Cauldron itself. Pure seastone columns and sweeping balconies overlooked the city below.
And they had carved the grand steps, rolling down from the Highcity to the Mid and from the Midcity to Lowtown. They had even rebuilt the old temples and lavished the gods’ seven towers with beautiful casings of stone brickwork so the faithful could live and pray hundreds of feet above the city.
But that was before the Cyran Empire opened the gate and ripped through the Cauldron like a northern storm.
Now, the Coward Queen was only a servant of the Empire. As long as she was willing to do what they told her, she was allowed to live. She bowed to the whims of cyran politicians and nobles who now infested the Highcity and the cliff palaces. Always, their desires came at the expense of her people.
The key to sabotage—the way to do it right—was to make them think you weren’t doing it at all.
When the Magistrate told her to hire bounty hunters, she hired the best money could buy. Ryke hired a cyran tinker who owned a clutch of spiderachs—four-legged constructs—specifically manufactured to scale the heights of the Cauldron and subdue targets at range.
Then, the Magistrate added his own agent—a vile, hobbled, slimy creature from the deep jungles. Even then, Ryke offered the agent full access to her staff, as it was.
That had been hard. To look at that nameless, slimy creature, with its slit eyes protruding from its face and a mouth large enough to swallow her head, and pretend it didn’t make her skin crawl.
And when the Magistrate told Ryke to capture the human and bring it to him when he returned from Cyre . . . Ryke had to hide her smile.
Oh, I intend to, she thought. Bet your life on it, Magistrate.
Never, in all her days, did Ryke think she would get this chance. For the last human had been found on Gaiam, of all planets. In her city. Truly, the gods must have been listening.
The Queen they called a coward stood on her personal balcony, looking out over her city. The somber breeze danced through her feathers and the light, flowing fabric of her evening dress. A warm sun set over the mountains, igniting the rooftops with an orange hue and the streets with a deep violet.
Down below, the streets were already alive with festival lights. Snatches of song and music escaped the gathering crowds and wandered up even to her palace. And there are the priests. Twin lines of light, snaking out of the Midcity and forming a slow circle around the gate. They would be preened and heavy with jewels and decked out in their holiest robes tonight, the kind that accentuated their glorious tail feathers and vivacious crown feathers.
A rustle of fabric caught the Queen’s ear. The curtain wall that separated her chambers from the balcony was pulled apart, and talons clicked on stone.
Ryke could tell who it was without even looking.
“Your Highness?” Talya said. One of her wingmaidens.
No, she isn’t yours, Ryke reminded herself. The Empire owns her, just like they own you.
“Begging your pardon, Highness. The other maidens and I were talking, and I thought you might—”
“No.”
“Your Highness? You don’t even know what I’m going to—”
“I’m not allowed to speak of the tower or why it lit up. Nor the human.”
“How did you know . . .” Talya’s beak, the color of a blood orange, worked at the empty air. Her smooth, white feathers lay flat against her scalp.
“Talya, you are not the first wingmaiden to ask, though you are certainly the least subtle. I’ll tell you what I told the others: I am not permitted to speak about the human. The Magistrate decreed it.”
“I understand, Your Highness.” Talya bowed. But she did not leave. Her talons scratched timidly at the seastone balcony. As if an innocent question were burning her up from the inside but she was afraid to let it out.
Nothing but an act to slip past Ryke’s defenses. But for a moment, Ryke could almost believe her.
When had her own wingmaidens learned to deceive her so deftly?
Ryke sighed. She should have Talya whipped for disobedience. Or, at least, she should threaten to whip her. But there were some parts that even the Coward Queen couldn’t play.
“What is it, Talya?” Ryke said roughly. “Out with it.”
Talya bowed her head. Her voice was soft, barely audible above the slow-moving breeze. “My mother was a believer.”
“Your mother?” Ryke asked. Meaning, not you?
Talya either missed her meaning or ignored it. “My mother prayed in the old ways. She used to say that the royals were conduits to the past. That they were closer to the gods than the rest of us. I wanted to know, Your Highness. When the lights ran up the tower, did you feel it?”
“Did I feel it?” Ryke said slowly, careful, lest her question give away too much. What is she trying to get from me, anyway?
“What should I have felt?”
Talya held her answer in her beak, as if she was afraid to speak, until it tumbled out all at once. “Well, it’s just that . . . my mother said the royals know the works of the gods. She said that you could feel them in your blood. That’s how the royals found the gate in the first place, isn’t it? So when I saw the tower light up, I thought of you. I wanted to know . . . could you feel anything?”
So convincing. She played the shy wingmaiden so well.
It bothered Ryke that she didn’t know who Talya was reporting to. Who she was spying for.
Not that Talya, or any of Ryke’s wingmaidens, had a choice. When the cyrans called, you had to answer. Even Ryke was only Queen as long as she could keep her people in line. Any break, any crack at all, and the imperials would seize her, kill her, and appoint a new monarch. They didn’t care.
But there was a glint of desperation in Talya’s eyes.
Or maybe Ryke was just seeing what she wanted to see. Someone else like her.
What should she say?
She could start with the truth: Talya, I don’t feel a damn thing when the gate opens. None of the royals ever have. That was only a story the priests used to tell the lower castes to keep them in line.
And what about the other truth? She had felt something, though it had nothing to do with her royal blood. When that strange lightning wrapped itself around the leaning tower and washed the Midcity and part of Lowtown in a lightning-blue glow, it sent a quiet, desperate wish fluttering into her thoughts. Please, let this be a sign.
Ryke knew the imperials were acting strange. The Magistrate had arrived almost a year ago and declared he wanted to spend more time “governing my favorite planet.” He hadn’t been on Gaiam since the war ended.
He brought more imperials with him, more soldiers. The cyrans started patrolling Lowtown, which they had never done before. She knew they were looking for something.
But she never dreamed they would find him. The one who was foretold.
“I did feel something,” Ryke said. “Something I haven’t felt in a long time, Talya.”
Ryke’s answer seemed to satisfy Talya. And though the wingmaiden was supposed to be preparing Ryke’s chambers for the night’s rest, the two of them stood at the balcony a while longer. Watching the last of Harvest’s festivities unfolding far below.
Despite the spying, Talya still made pleasant company. And there was no better view of the gate than right here, on the balcony of the Hanging Palace.
There, now, was the Magistrate’s procession. His great black box floated on nothing at all while four-legged drudges pulled it through the city. His centurion guard marched in perfect formation ahead and behind the box. Firelight reflected off the gold in their armor and the steel in their guns, making them gleam and sparkle like metallic stars in a sea of torches.
As the Magistrate’s procession approached the center of the Midcity, the cheers and shouting began to grow. They were counting down his steps to the gate.
The priests and their torches, standing in a circle around the gate, parted to allow the Magistrate through. The gate had two “arms”—semicircular rings that floated motionlessly above the main platform. The Magistrate’s black box passed underneath one of the arms and hovered to the center of the gate.
An imperial horn sounded. And then, to the cheers of the masses, hundreds of merchants pulled, pushed, and crowded their way onto the gate. Packdragons lowed as they dragged huge carts—piled high with fruits and redenite-made constructs and deep-sea fish and jungle-grown tobaccos and everything else Gaiam had to offer—onto the circular platform until the gate was almost overflowing.
“Here we go,” Talya whispered breathlessly as the crowd began roaring their countdown. It was the priests who led them, encouraging the crowd to sing and screech and crow and shout louder.
Even Ryke found her heart beating faster than usual. There was nothing like watching the gate open.
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The twin metal semicircles began to move, beginning their slow, heavy rotation around the gate. Each time they passed each other, they added to their momentum until those massive slabs of metal were spinning so rapidly they made a moaning whoop-whoop-whoop sound that echoed all through the Cauldron.
Faster, until they were a blur of light and motion. Faster, until the gate was a solid cylinder of metal.
Faster, until the metal became invisible to the naked eye. And the gate began to sing its song: a high, keening sound that was not quite music.
And there was that unmistakable light. A blue lightning crackled across the gate, blossoming into an explosion of blinding whiteness. The gate’s song reached its last climactic note.
A flash. Brighter than the sun. A streak of light appeared, a pillar that reached from the ground to the stars unseen above.
It was gone in a blink.
The keening dropped to a moan, to a rhythmic whooping, to a grinding sound. To a stop.
The Cauldron roared with joy.
Gone were the traders. Gone were the Magistrate and his centurion guard.
In their place, a whole new crop of merchants and tourists and crafters seeking a new life on Gaiam, a better deal. How many of them had come from planets that Ryke had never even heard of? Even Ryke could not disguise her awe. The gate, this bridge to another world, was the new lifeblood of her city. Opening it was the only good thing the Empire had done for her people.
And it was the reason she wanted her people to stay with the Empire.
The crowds surged toward the new arrivals, not even letting them get off the gate as they rushed to barter and trade or just gawk at the alien peoples of which they had never dreamed. Music and bursts of fireworks, saved just for this moment, echoed up to the palace balconies.
Next to Ryke, Talya gave a wistful sigh.
“Talya,” Ryke said.
“Yes, Your Highness?”
“They’re starting without you.”
“But I’m on duty tonight. I drew shortest straw.”
“I won’t tell if you won’t.” Ryke winked.
Talya bowed and thanked the Queen profusely before running off. She stopped halfway to the chamber’s curtain wall. “You should come down, too, Your Highness. There’s food, and dancing, and—”
“Not tonight, I think. I’ve got one last thing to attend to.”
Talya bowed and promised to bring Ryke something called a coron cake.
And then, Ryke was alone.
Finally.
She unlaced her dress, revealing the dark blue leathers underneath. She pulled out a bag of black powder and began to coat the pristine whites and mahogany browns of her feathers with coal dust.
Ryke slipped her grandfather’s goggles over her forehead, careful not to smudge the dust. She had rescued them from her grandfather’s personal armory the very night they hauled him away. The last time she ever saw him . . .
She stepped up onto the railing, wrapping her talons around the smooth seastone. Ryke spread her arms, letting that warm, slow breeze languish in her long wing feathers. It beckoned her, begging her to fly out into the city.
Into her city.
Because if anyone was going to find the last living human, the Savior himself, it should not be that blaspheming Magistrate. Nor some gang of Lowtown thieves.
It should be her.
And so, the last true monarch of Gaiam dropped off the balcony and thrust herself into the night.
***
The monarchs of Gaiam do not fly.
Such violent forms of travel were undignified, unbecoming a royal-born princess.
What would the people say if they saw their great ruler using her own wings to travel?
When Ryke was young, she always thought it was desperately unfair that everyone, from the lowest crowcaste to the noble falkyr warriors, were trained to spread their wings and leap into the air. But she was expected to forever remain chained to the ground.
Even the avians in the far cities and the uncivilized jungle-born flew. Ryke remembered how she used to hate her wings. At least, until she figured out how to escape her servants (the perks of being only a minor royal) and taught herself how to flap and float and fly through the night skies.
You don’t know what life is until the only thing between you and death is the air and the strength of your wings.
Nobody else can keep you in the air. It’s you and you alone.
Tonight, each breath was sweeter than the last. Humid sweat turned cool as the winds rippled over her and under her until it felt as though she were swimming through a thick, airy current of resistance, her wings slicing and pumping against the unseen liquid sky. She tucked her wings against herself, turning her body into an arrow.
Ryke fell and laughed as she fell, as the city below rose up to meet her.
She unfurled her great wings and threw them down, pulling her body back up into the sky. Her dark shape cast a silhouette across the brick and shingle roofs, the ornate domes and steeples, the merchant shops and twisting avenues of the Midcity.
She tasted the acrid sweetness of incense as she passed over the Holy Quarter. She soared over the gate, listening to the songs and the music of her people below as they celebrated Gaiam’s newest arrivals. Traders, and carts stacked high with goods and avians returned from that new world called Cyre, and . . . and her heart sank.
So many imperials. So many soldiers.
Where were they supposed to house them all? How many of her own people would be displaced just to make space for these invaders?
Ryke shook the thought out of her mind. There was nothing she could do about that right now. Tonight, she had one purpose and one alone. The southeastern tower loomed on the Midcity cliffs, the ancient brickwork leaning dangerously over the Lowtown cliff. That tower always threatened to fall. Each year, there was gossip that more bricks fell from its mortared heights. But it never did.
Ryke circled around the tower once, just dipping her wings into Lowtown. There were guards, mostly avian, but a few imperials at work too, stationed on the wide granite parapets. More than usual tonight, but their eyes were cast downward to the festivities. None of them were watching for a lone royal, flying high above the city. Spearing down to the center of the tower’s angled roof.
She dropped as close to the stairs as she could manage. Her talons barely scraped the granite.
One guard was inhaling a twist of tobacco, the cigar clamped softly in his beak, the smoke curling up to the twinkling stars above. The others had a casket of wine or ale or something and were passing it around. All of them had their backs turned to her, listening to the music from the city below.
Ryke lifted the trapdoor that led down to the stairway and closed it quietly behind her. No sense in sounding the alarm this early. If she was successful tonight, well, it was only a matter of time before the Magistrate heard.
Gods, save us. Kanya, watch over me.
In the darkness below the trapdoor, she slid the goggles over her eyes. The eyepieces formed a seal against her eye sockets and her beak. Whatever material they were made from, it felt like rubber and silk at the same time. The goggles clicked on, and suddenly everything was awash in a green light that only she could see.
Unlike the other six towers that ringed the Cauldron, the leaning tower was never made into a temple. Instead, the denizens of the Midcity had turned it into an enormous living complex rising hundreds of feet above the city. Each slanted floor held a dozen or so apartments according to no one’s plan. The hallways turned and twisted, ending at random. The stairs down were always hard to find, and once, in simpler times, Ryke’s grandfather hired builders to fireproof the interiors.
But for now, many poorer avians and a sprawling family of green-scaled gaskals made their homes here. But there was only one person she cared to see right now. And the Green Doctor lived all the way down in the basement.
Ryke plunged soundlessly through the hallways. She peeked around the corners or stopped to listen to passersby.
At one intersection, a sound stopped her. A patrol of three guards were walking up the hallway. One of them held a lantern that almost blinded her until the strength of her goggles adjusted and dampened the light.
Ryke opened the nearest door. A stairwell, darkened by shadows. The voices grew louder as they thumped closer. Closer. And started to fade.
Only then did she notice the chair at the top of the cramped steps, and the guard who was sitting in it. A heavyset passerine whose dark blue feathers were fringed with gray.
Ryke held her breath. Dared not to move.
He snorted, almost jolting himself awake, and kept snoring.
Praise be to the gods.
She was about to step past him when she heard a shout from down the stairs.
“Kassim!” the voice called. “Kassim, wake up!”
The old blue avian grunted awake, his eyes coming slowly open as he leaned over the spiral stairwell (without getting up from his chair). Ryke was standing two inches behind him, holding a hand up to her beak, trying to cover her nose holes.
“What?” Kassim shouted back, pretending that he had been awake this whole time.
“You were snoring!”
Kassim cleared the sleep from his throat with a guttural croak. “You think I was snoring?”
“Don’t act like you weren’t. The whole city can hear you!”
“Fledgling brat! I’ve been on duty since before you were born. I never sleep!”
“So, when Sergeant Vasil caught you curled up in the closet last week? What was that?”
“I should come down there and put you to sleep!” Kassim jostled on his chair, and for a moment, Ryke thought he might actually get up. But Kassim, apparently, was the kind of guard who threatened action but never actually took it.
“Pah!” the other guard said. “Go back to sleep, you old rook.”
“Pah,” Kassim said, lazily flapping a wing out over the stairwell. He grumbled to himself about overexcited youths and sleeping with both eyes open. And then he let his head fall back against the wall—his feathers very nearly touching Ryke—closed his eyes, and began to snore.
Ryke squeezed past him, holding in her breath so her feathers wouldn’t brush against him. Then she crept down the spiral stairs. Between the cracked bricks and ancient mortar, long, dark vines grew up the walls. With each floor she descended, the vines thickened, becoming roots, becoming a thick, sturdy trunk that rose up from the depths of the tower.
The rest of the floors were blessedly empty. No sign of that heckling guard or the imperials, not even the redenites that often scurried in the lower dens.
Ryke had been seeing the Doctor ever since the imperials came through the gate nineteen years ago, and Ryke found that she could no longer trust the royal physicians.
The ancient, plantlike sapient had been living in the basement of the leaning tower for generations and had an uncanny mastery over the herbal and healing arts. Always, the Doctor was surrounded by light: dozens of old tech sunpanels that never seemed to shut off and hundreds of gas lamps that made the basement feel like a furnace.
But not tonight.
Tonight, the basement was dark. The floors were barren of all but the largest roots, and not a leaf was in sight. Even the air was chill, despite the thick humidity.
Without the goggles, Ryke might not have seen the gashes in the main bulk of the Doctor’s trunk. Six deep slashes gouged their ancient bark.
“Doctor?” Ryke whispered, tapping tentatively on their trunk. “It’s me. What happened?”
Then she noticed the wet, sticky fluid oozing out of the gashes. She was reaching out to touch it when three vines dropped from the ceiling and lashed at her. And went limp.
“Don’t!” a whispering voice said. “Poison . . .”
“Who did this?” she demanded, as if she could undo this heinous act with anger alone.
The Doctor always spoke slowly. But tonight, their words were weak and breathless.
“The human . . . came. It was . . . dying.”
Ryke inhaled sharply.
“I helped . . . as much as I could. They left . . . before . . . the assassins . . .”
“The cyran machines did this?” she said, feeling the deep gulf of guilt sucking at her heart. She had hired them. This was her fault.
“No . . .” the Doctor sighed. “Cyran machines . . . and one who wears . . . poison on his skin.”
The nameless assassin, then. But why would he harm the Doctor?
“My Queen . . . if you hurry . . . you may catch them.” The Doctor gestured with its vines toward the open sewer grate in the middle of the floor. But their vines were weak and straining to hold themselves up, like stems left too long in the sun.
She stared into that darkness, her goggles illuminating the dark in green and gray. And the Doctor’s wounds, where the sticky globs of fluid were hardening into amber scabs.
“What about you?”
“I . . . will take care of . . . myself. I will . . .” But the Doctor’s vines slumped, falling limp to the floor. An anemic rush of air passed out of the trunk.
That was answer enough.
Ryke found a set of scalpels and gloves in one of the basement’s many rooms, and over the next hour, she pried every dried drop of poison out of the Doctor’s mutilated bark, careful not to get it on her skin.
She splashed as much water as she dared into the wounds, letting it drain down into the sewer grate. Then, she singed off the dead plant tissue with a torch and cauterized the rest. Burns were better than poisoned blood.
This bounty hunter . . . Ryke knew its kind all too well.
During her grandfather’s reign, the vile, barbaric creatures were not allowed in the Cauldron. But the imperials saw them as useful tools. They trained them to hunt down Ryke’s kin after the war, as swift as it was. She had seen the bodies of her own brothers and sisters covered in those webbed handprints. The skin rotting to blackness.
A knot of panic tightened in her chest.
It’s going to kill the human.
Didn’t the Magistrate know what would happen when he hired that nameless thing?
Does he not care?
“My Queen . . .” The Doctor’s voice was still husky and frail. But their vines pushed at her. “I will live . . . You must go . . .”
“Tell me where to find them.”
Weakened, their words were split between common and the old tongue. “The androfex and the avian . . . they take the Achinwoan . . . to ach kotal bawgh.”
It was a name Ryke had not heard in a long time. Ach kotal bawgh. Her grandfather had told her stories of that mythical, long-lost place.
The Undermost City.